Messy Apple Divorce

I have a older friend that just upgraded from an iPhone 5 to a Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

The iPhone 5 was his second iPhone and he liked it well enough until the 7.1 update, which made certain interface elements too small. The incoming call screen contact photos were reduced from being large and easily recognizable to a tiny little hard-to-see thumbnail sized bubble. Also the 7.1 update caused a couple of his fitness apps to no longer function properly — opening one of them would make it necessary to reboot the phone every time it was run.

So, after seeing my Note 3, he decided it was time to move up to a bigger screen and the much better battery life offered by the Note 3.

AT&T ported his phone number over to the new device. All seemed well, until his relatives (a son and a couple of grand kids) that still had iPhones using iMessages could not text his new phone. It seems that there is a well-known problem that happens when a phone number is ported away from an iPhone where iMessages has been used for texting with other iPhones.

Doing a Google search for the problem reveals that there are plenty of people experiencing this problem. If you have an iPhone and used iMessages for texting and port the number to a non-iPhone, regardless of whether it’s another smartphone or even a flip phone, iMessages will capture any text messages sent from any other iPhone where iMessages is still in use.

There are a few work-arounds and perhaps a definitive fix. The other people with iPhones with iMessages enabled can go into their settings and disable iMessages and use regular texting, and their texts to the ported number will go through to the non-Apple phone. Another suggestion is for the user that has ported their number to the non-Apple device log in to their Apple account and remove the old device from their list of Apple devices.

The third way, which may be the definitive solution, is to text “help” to 48369. This generates a reply from Apple, to which you reply “stop.” According to someone who spent time on the phone with Apple support this is supposed to take anywhere from 4 to 12 hours to resolve the issue.

As people move away from iPhones that use iMessages to larger-screened smartphones because of diminished ability to read tiny print, this is likely to become a more widespread issue, which is useful to be aware of even if you are a die-hard iPhone fan and have no intention of switching.